Already Dead

33

Fry had been expecting the incident in which Charlie Dean had died to be similar to the spate of botched petrol thefts in the county. Brake lines cut in mistake for the fuel line. Local officers had been despatched to ask questions of the neighbours and check other vehicles on Green Hill and neighbouring properties on The Dale. Given the nature of the roads and their steep inclines, the exercise had been given priority. The results were already in. Nothing. No other reports of brake or fuel lines being tampered with.

‘Deliberate, then?’ asked Fry when she arrived back at the garage, taking Luke Irvine with her from West Street.

‘Certainly,’ said the vehicle examiner. ‘And one other thing I can tell you — this was a professional job.’

‘Professional?’

‘Skilled, anyway. Oh, the lines are steel and you can cut right through them easily enough with a wire cutter. If a line is cut, the fluid takes the path of least resistance, which is the hole. It won’t leak out of a small hole unless you press on the brake, and then you’ll feel it getting mushy. A big hole will leak it all out before the person gets in the car, and the dead brake will be pretty obvious right away.’

‘So…?’

‘Well, to catch somebody out, you want the brake to appear functional when they get in the car and start moving, but then have all the fluid leak out and the brakes totally non-functional once they get up speed.’ He shook his head. ‘Personally, I just don’t see how that’s possible by simply damaging the line. I think the whole cutting of the brake line as a method of murdering is a Hollywood fantasy. If a line is cut through, a driver would have to be pretty clueless not to notice it on the first application of the brakes.’

One of the mechanics emerged from behind a van where he’d been listening, and grinned at her.

‘Some mice with a taste for brake fluid gnawed through the brake line on my wife’s new RAV4,’ he said. ‘She backed out of the driveway fine, drove to the end of the road, hit the brakes at the lights, and rolled out into the junction. There was no traffic coming, but if there had been she’d have been hit by a vehicle at thirty-five miles an hour.’

‘That was your own fault, Gary,’ said the examiner. ‘You should have made sure you did it when the traffic was busier.’

Gary laughed and wandered off, pulling on a new pair of latex gloves.

‘Anyway,’ said the examiner, ‘if you’re clever, you use a different method. You could add a substance that lowers the boiling point of the fluid. The brakes heat up and the fluid boils. Gas pockets mean no brakes, see. As soon as the brakes get used hard, they’ll fail. You have the added bonus that when everything cools off it all looks normal. Unless you do a chemical analysis of the brake fluid, no one would ever know.’

‘Was that done here?’

‘No. Either way, brake sabotage is a sloppy way to try to harm someone. There are too many ways it could fail. If you’re smart, you look for an alternative. Your man was smart. It’s even cleverer to interfere with the physical linkage from the pedal to the brake master cylinder. Maybe replace part of the linkage with something that will break on application of the brakes. That’s the only sure way to have a one hundred per cent failure that wouldn’t be noticed before it happens.’

‘Is that what happened here?’

‘Yes. The steering linkage has been sabotaged. It can be done pretty easily and there’d be a sudden, unpredictable loss of steering control. Our saboteur went for the double whammy here. Brakes and steering. He wanted to make sure it worked properly.’

‘I don’t think we’re looking too far for this one, do you?’ said Irvine as they left.

‘Why do you say that, Luke?’

‘Well, what does Sheena Sullivan’s husband do for a living?’

‘He’s a garage mechanic.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Jumping to a conclusion?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Me too,’ said Fry, grateful that something appeared straightforward at last.

Even when there were no injuries, cutting the brakes on someone’s vehicle would result in charges of attempted malicious wounding, causing criminal damage with intent, vehicle tampering, destruction of property. In Jay Sullivan’s case, it would be manslaughter at least.

The Sullivans’ house was a fairly modern three-bedroom detached on Yokecliffe Avenue, with a pocket handkerchief garden in front — a few feet of unfenced grass surrounding a patch of soil which contained more ornamental rocks than plants.

In Fry’s view, the house could only just be described as detached — the neighbouring properties couldn’t be any more than four or five feet away. There were no windows in the side walls, because there was nothing to look out at except the brickwork of the house next door. But the property did possess off-street parking — and that seemed to be quite something in Wirksworth.

She entered through a sun room into a large kitchen. There was a wood burning stove in the lounge, but it looked too clean, as if it was only there for show and had never been used for anything so messy as burning wood. The gas central heating was much more convenient.

Fry had noticed this phenomenon often enough around the villages of Derbyshire. House owners seemed to hanker after a rustic look inside their homes, but without the trouble of real country life. Sometimes it wasn’t just the stove that had a purely decorative purpose, but the logs too. She’d seen them stacked up by the fire, all perfectly round and symmetrical, cut cleanly and in identical lengths. The giveaway was their unnatural air of permanence, as if they were dusted and sprayed with air freshener once a week. They were more of an art installation than a stock of winter fuel.

Naturally, Fry had come to regard this as one of the symptoms of middle-class bucolic pretensions, like green wellies and an overfed pony in a paddock. She wasn’t surprised that Sheena Sullivan had developed those pretensions. Sheena had turned away from the car mechanic husband with a garage full of oily engine parts to the smooth estate agent lover with a red BMW. It was upward mobility of a kind, she supposed. But her upward mobility had ended in a tragic downward plunge as that BMW hurtled uncontrollably down Green Hill. She wondered if Jay Sullivan had worked out the symbolism in it. Probably not, she thought.

Sullivan had been arrested and escorted to the station in Edendale for processing. Fry wasn’t sure what she might find in his house. Evidence that he’d been aware of the affair between his wife and Charlie Dean, perhaps.

She could see that Sullivan had been to the local Chinese takeaway for his evening meal last night. Sweet and sour pork with boiled rice, and a special chow mein. The foil containers still lay on the kitchen counter, red streaks of sweet and sour sauce, a blob of uneaten rice, the remains of a side order of prawn crackers in a grease-stained bag. This was a meal for two people, surely. Who had Jay Sullivan been entertaining while his wife was in hospital?

Fry found a fortune cookie, opened but abandoned. The strip of paper inside it read: Now is the time to try something new.

Diane Fry was back at her desk, tapping irritably at her keyboard to input a report when Matt Cooper called. At first, she had no idea who she was talking to, and that made her more irritable.

‘Sorry, who are you?’ she said.

‘Matt Cooper. I’m Ben Cooper’s brother. That is Detective Sergeant Fry, isn’t it? I thought you might remember.’

‘Oh. Of course, I do remember you. There was the incident at the farm…’

‘Yes, the burglars. But I’d rather not think about that too much.’

Fry looked back at her computer screen and tapped a few more keystrokes, mentally dismissing the call as unimportant.

‘It all turned out well for you in the end, though, Mr Cooper,’ she said.

‘Yes, but that isn’t why I’m calling you. You left your card when you were here at the time. And I knew … well, I knew that you worked with my brother. It’s him I’m phoning about.’

She stopped typing. ‘I can’t discuss colleagues with you, sir. It’s not appropriate.’

But Matt seemed not to have heard her. His voice kept on droning in her ear. It was as if he’d wound himself up to say something, and nothing was going to stop him getting it all out now that he’d started.

‘I just can’t get through to him,’ he was saying. ‘Not in the state of mind that Ben’s got himself into now. And the doctors are no use at all. He’s going to them regularly, keeps all his appointments. Physically he’s healing, but they can’t touch what’s going on inside.’

‘Mmm,’ said Fry. She’d spotted an error on screen. It was lucky that she’d seen it. If she let herself get distracted she’d more mistakes. She needed to get off this call as soon as she could, without being too rude to a member of the public.

But Matt was still speaking.

‘And now I’m getting worried that he might do something really stupid,’ he said.

The idea of Ben Cooper doing something stupid wasn’t exactly a new one in Fry’s experience. She’d first set eyes on him when he was making a fool of himself, and his capacity for doing stupid things hadn’t diminished over the years. She could have begun to list them and still be remembering more when it was time to go home for the night. But probably his brother wouldn’t want to hear them right now.

‘Like what?’ asked Fry instead.

‘Well, you know how the death of Liz Petty has affected him. She was his fiancée. It should have been their wedding next week, and it’s all such a nightmare…’

‘Yes, I know about that,’ said Fry impatiently.

‘The thing is, Ben is all eaten up with the idea that some of the people responsible might get away without being punished properly for what they did. Obviously, he’s seen an awful lot of cases — and I’m sure you have too — where the guilty parties are let off by the courts. Not enough evidence, and all that. Reasonable doubt, some technicality in the law, a clever defence lawyer. You know what it’s like.’

‘Mmm.’

On the other end of the phone, Matt took a deep breath. He finally seemed to be winding down, or getting to the end of his speech. Not that it had been much of a speech so far. Fry remembered him as a sullen, taciturn Derbyshire farmer who didn’t say more than a few words if he could avoid it, and then only to complain about the weather and the price of milk. This call must already have used up all his available words for the rest of the year.

‘And I think Ben might be going to take things into his own hands and make a mistake that he’ll regret. That we’ll all regret.’

‘Like what?’ she said again.

But he didn’t spell out what he meant. Perhaps he couldn’t. He was a member of the public, and they were notoriously vague and unable to explain themselves. Her life would be so much simpler if she didn’t have to deal with MOPs.

‘Well, I’m wondering if we should do something about him,’ said Matt. ‘Oh, when I say we … I mean, I’ve tried and it’s all gone wrong. Not that Ben ever listened to me anyway. Not to his older brother. Oh, no. That would be much too sensible. So when I say we, I mean I’m wondering if you…’

Fry rolled her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation and banged her mouse on its mat with an angry little flash of red laser light. So after all, this was just one more person who’d decided she was the perfect choice to sort out Ben Cooper and whatever his damn problems might be. Were they all mad? In what crazy, upside down universe did everyone go rushing to Diane Fry for help in coping with their personal problems? And not even their own problems, Ben Cooper’s, for heaven’s sake. If there was a league table of people who cared about Cooper’s psychological welfare she’d be right at the bottom of it, deep in the relegation zone and in danger of dropping into another division altogether, where she didn’t care at all.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Cooper, but I think you’ve called the wrong person,’ she said, her fingers already tensing to put down the phone.

‘It’s just …’ said Matt hastily, as if sensing correctly that she was about to hang up. ‘I thought you ought to know … he’s got my gun.’

Fry froze, wondering if she’d misheard him. She pressed the receiver closer to her hear.

‘Did you say…?’

‘Yes, he has my gun. My shotgun. And a box of cartridges.’

‘What is he planning to do with it? Where is he going?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ said Matt. ‘But he’s been obsessed for weeks with this barman, Josh Lane. You know, he-’

‘Yes, I know.’

Fry had a horribly clear recollection of the moment she’d entered Ben Cooper’s flat in Welbeck Street with Becky Hurst and set eyes on the collage of cuttings on his kitchen wall. The arson at the Light House, the shocking death of Derbyshire Constabulary civilian scenes of crime officer Elizabeth Petty. The funeral, the tributes the uniformed pall-bearers. Killed in the line of duty. And all the photos of Eliot Wharton and Josh Lane. The free space left for the ultimate fate of the owners of those two faces.

She put the phone down, her mind whirling. Around her, the normal activity of the CID room continued. Hurst and Irvine were engaged in calls and were taking no notice of her. Murfin was out of the room, probably gone to the Gents, or to sneak a surreptitious snack.

Only Carol Villiers looked up, sensing that something had happened. Fry refused to meet her eye. She was staring out of the window at the rain, feeling thoughts falling in and out of her mind as fast as the raindrops hitting the pane. She ought to say something at once, report what she’d been told by Matt Cooper. She should raise the alarm. Within minutes, armed response would be mobilised, units would be despatched to locate Cooper, there would be a massive, high-profile operation. Ben Cooper would be arrested at gunpoint. But how could she allow that to happen?

But the longer Fry sat there thinking about it, the more certain she became that she wasn’t going to do that. She couldn’t set off that kind of commotion, couldn’t put Cooper through it.

She remembered their last conversation clearly. The talk about his obsession with Josh Lane and the fire at the Light House in which Liz Petty had died.

‘There’s no evidence, Ben. The CPS won’t even consider amending the charges against him.’

‘So he stays out on bail.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. Really sorry.’

‘So am I.’

‘So what are you going to do next?’

‘Is that any of your concern?’

But it was her concern. She was responsible for this situation. And, when it came down to it, there was the question of loyalty.

In Welbeck Street, Diane Fry was not surprised to find that there was no answer to her knock at Ben Cooper’s flat. In no mood for patience or discretion now, she went straight to the landlady’s house next door.

‘Can I help you?’ said the old lady from behind her security chain.

‘Mrs Shelley,’ said Fry.

‘Yes? Who are you?’

Fry realised that the old lady didn’t remember her from five days previously, when she’d called here with Becky Hurst.

‘I’m a police officer.’ Fry showed her warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Fry.’

Again, Mrs Shelley didn’t even look at her ID, but peered at her as she shushed the dog.

‘I’m a friend of Ben’s,’ said Fry, speaking as loudly as she could. ‘Do you remember-?’

‘He told me he’s fine,’ said Mrs Shelley. ‘Just fine.’

And she slammed the door.